Dramatized clickbait headline.
What the article actually says is more like “we might be able to revive you if not too many if your cells have died, even if your heart and brain seem to have stopped.”
AKA they are working on a next tier of CPR.
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When I fall asleep, the conscious being that I am right now is not going to just never wake up.
But how do you know this? That’s the root of the question.
How would you distinguish “I woke up as the same consciousness” from “I woke up as a new consciousness with an identical memory”, from the first person perspective?
One answer could be that having the exact same memories means you are the exact same consciousness. But this means that your moment-to-moment feeling of “self” is not actually intrinsic to your consciousness, since the memories alone are sufficient.
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You seem to be missing the point of the philosophical question.
Just because you feel like you are the same conscious doesn’t mean you are, which is what needs proving. We need to demonstrate that we have some way to know we are a different entity without just saying “I know I am”. Is it enough to have the same set of memories? Surely not, as the Star Trek thought experiment implies.
For the record I do have an inner monologue. I just also think that the notion of consciousness and what it means to “be” the conscious process isn’t as simple and clear-cut as you think it is.
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As long as your brain mass has not deteriorated you should still have access to at least your long term memory. But in theory it could range from a terrible hangover to amnesia and brain damage, and in that case recovery may take longer and you may end up being a completely different person, as it can already happen with some accidents.
At that point you “die” every time you fall asleep.
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I wasn’t making any arguments for or against. For the record, I don’t agree with the comic. I simply found it relevant based on it touching similar topics to what you wrote, and thought I would share. But, that’s my bad for posting a link with zero explanation.
The comic is fine. You’re assuming that all humans act rationally. This is clearly the story of a man who had an irrational fear that didn’t bother everyone else, and then learned to deal with it, in a way.
Essentially the protagonist isn’t you, but it certainly falls in the range of expected behavior for someone out there.
I hope having a transporter device is more like folding space than particle-scanning and reconstruction. The scanning and reconstruction would still be great for replacing or repairing lost or deteriorating structures. Regardless, I have a number of questions that come up as we learn more about how our brain might work.
If our brain is changed in (near) death how would we determine what was lost?
Could we even reconstruct consciousness (this could be also gradual, but what is the speed of consciousness)?
It seems more like we would have to gradually move our conscious processing from per-existing wetware to whatever replaces it (even more wetware). It should behave like our brain as much as possible, but I don’t think we could avoid being different from what we were.
Our own brain changes over time, do we think the way we did when we were 5? How different will we think far later in life (assuming our brain is at least healthy)? I think we would have to accept changes in our fundamental being (which is already very challenging). The difference is that not only could we live for longer physically, but within the pure consciousness an entire lifetime could be lived in less than a second. We experience this temporarily in dreams, or while experiencing a life threatening event such as an automobile accident or the final moments of death itself. What if that was extended over physical months, years, decades? How would we deal with such a inheritance, who would teach us how to cope and find meaning?
Would we want to live life at the speed of the physical world after such an experience?
I mean it depends. If you get liquified by the implosion of a submersible three quarters of the way to the Titanic, there’s not much of a process.
A very momentary process.
Many who have watched someone die will likely know this
It’s not like the light leaves their eyes and that’s it
My cousin’s breathing stopped, but his heart kept stopping and starting again. He was clearly gone, but certain parts didn’t stop working for several minutes
Yeah nothing about this seems like it shouldn’t be obvious, it takes some time for everything to fail, just like being ‘alive’ and having a single organ fail, you can be in various states of ‘alive’.
My death is when I permanently stop experiencing life.
Not sure what that means for an ‘Upload’ scenario… I guess he’s just a swamp man of me and he’s alive but I’m not anymore… but I’m not signing up for the digital afterlife anyway.
There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
At what point do I go through their clothes and look for loose change?
The article by the Guardian that is linked is very interesting! I can really recommend reading it to people interested in this stuff.
Thanks for recommending the guardian link. Crazy stories in there and an interesting conclusion on what we’re learning about death.
Makes me wonder about organ donations and if the timing for those may change based on newer findings…
Yes, that is an interesting question as well. I am wondering what the people with near death experiences could still experience from their bodies, because that would make a big difference as well.
What a low effort article.
WTB device to make it a point.
As someone else in here mentioned, a trip to titanic in a private submarine controlled by a rechargeable Xbox controller and a narcissist captain would be a good bet
I need something much cheaper.
These feet are nasty
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